A New Royalty Free License

Cutcaster is attempting to create a new type of Royalty Free license and way people get more security, assurances and rights then what currently is allowed under your typical RF contract. The CC license will address the way that people can use the rights granted in the agreement and how they can request extended rights from the seller for other uses. CC knows that this can be written in less confusing language and still provide security for both parties. We want to work with our community to customize a new contract that accepts the realities of the new media licensing landscape and addresses issues for example such as usage, indemnity, archiving and access. These issues shouldn’t be something that scare or confuses people but open a frank discussion about the ways the licensing contracts can be made clearer to avoid the old issues. To often there are multiple opinions on what these RF clauses mean. Where can parts of your standard RF contract be changed? Where do you want to see changes? What changes are fair?

Please see the RF license at CC here. This will evolve only with your help.

Youtube will begin testing Copyright Screening Technology

In a move long overdue, YouTube will begin to test it's new technology to identify copyrighted video that is uploaded to the site. According to Reuters, the technology scan is a "video fingerprinting tool" that will look for attributes in the video clips that it will be able to determine if the clip is copyrighted. I'm still not sure how well this will work or how they are going to get the "fingerprints" of the content beforehand on record.

I think for larger copyright holders this will be a good move for both them and YouTube. YouTube will give the holder the option to remove the clip or leave it up on the site and join a revenue sharing deal with YT. I'm not sure if this will be done for all users of YouTube or just for their bigger clients i.e. CBS, NBC. In addition, it looks like YouTube abandoned plans to do a deal with Audible Magic to provide this technology. In the end, I think that some of YouTube's traffic could be affected by this. There are a number of sites out there that still take a relaxed approach to copyrighted content being uploaded to its site.

Cutcaster is working on a logical way to detect whether content that is uploaded to the site is copyrighted and thus not able to be licensed. This is a big problem when trying to create an open marketplace where the participants feel that they are secure and can use the content they legally purchased without the fear that it will come back later to bite them in the butt. I'll be very excited to hear what people think of our solution when they see it after the launch. If you have any questions beforehand, please email me.

Black iMac...

As a quick side note, with the start of Apple's WWDC conference, I thought someone might comment on the rumors that they're going to release a black iMac. Check out this link to see what it might look like. This looks about 10x more bad-@ss than the white one. If you're a lifelong PC user like me (until recently), this might be the reason to switch.

Investors Wanted

I'll give 5 bucks to the person who tells me which one is Bill Gates?

What sites do you like?

What are some of the sites that you have gone to recently and liked a lot? There are so many new sites popping up each day. What sites do you go to everyday? What is it about the site that you like?

Just FInishing off a really long day of work

Hope everyone had a great week and has good plans for the weekend. I am absolutely beat from a long and productive week. It's supposed to be great weather here in NYC and I'm looking forward to a nice start to the day tomorrow at brunch with my sister, Jane, tomorrow.

If you want to waste some time and have a little fun, click here.

Good night and enjoy.

Need Content to help test site.

I have a favor to ask. We are testing our very basic content uploader for a variety of files that we anticipate will be uploaded when we go live in a few months. This is a huge favor and won’t take that much time. I promise. Can you take some of the videos, film cuts, photos or audio files that you have and upload them to the site. Getting a variety of file types and formats would be awesome if you can. I PROMISE you that we wont use these for anything other then testing the uploader and will erase them once we are done.

The uploader is found at here and is very easy to use as you can see.

Thanks in advance and let me know if you have any questions.

Shutterstock to sell Celebrity photos

About the Image had a good post on Shutterstock and their movement into the paparrazzi game. You can see the article here.

Do people who want to take pictures like these really need to get press passes from Shutterstock and what will this do for its user base? It will be interesting to see how this plays out. How hard is it to get the passes if you promise to give a percentage of your profits from the sales of the photos or video to the events themselves. So Shutterstock gets paid, pays a the producer and then pays the event. If this is true, what do you think would be a fair breakdown?

How to Promote your Videos on the Net?

It's really tough to get views and publicize your work on the Internet with the plethora of videos out there vying for peoples' attention. Trying to get your video to go viral or even seen can be a seriously daunting task. Attracting that an audience will increase your views and in your case on Cutcaster your sales and publicity.

Kevin Nalts had a really good write-up on techniques you can do to get traction with your audience and get your name out there.

My conclusion is that he posts a lot of interesting points. I really agree that the best tactic to get a following is to post a quality video response to a videographer who has a large following, promote your videos on a lot of different networks to get views and create a lot of good and targeted material. In addition to Kevin, I think that ads on the videos at this point are a bit of a turn-off for people. Also Kevin has to do a better job on describing these techniques or giving more in depth tips ie. Get Honored. How does one best achieve the goal of getting honored, Kevin?

And remember it take a bit of patience and a lot of hard work.

Back to Business...

So my partner lost his suitcase after returning from a trip to Germany...luckily, he carries his laptop on his person, so Cutcaster is still alive. In other news, at least twice a week we witness YouTube/Google's latest attempt to provide their users with real commercial content. They still are not addressing their creative producer community in any meaningful way (which is good for us b/c that's our business model), instead opting to appeal to the mass consumer of online video. I also thought this note about Apple at the end of the article was interesting:

"Apple announced last week that a free software update will allow users of its Apple TV device to watch YouTube content on their television sets. That update is expected later this month."


Apple's doing the same thing, which makes sense give the ubiquity of the iPod, etc. But the funny thing is that many creators are big are obviously big Apple customers as well. One day somebody will get it.